Christmas Fruitcakes

Angela Merkel isn’t as nutty as she sounds, or so she would have you to believe. She simply wants to have her Obst kuchen (“fruitcake”) and eat it too. The Obst kuchen, in this case, is liberalism, whereby people from every tribe under heaven—including the Islamic ones—live happily together in the Motherland, and all ethnic, racial, and especially religious differences are utterly meaningless. Conflicting claims about the very nature of reality simply won’t matter in the bland Bundesrepublik. On the other hand, the fruitcake must be eaten, so everyone is obligated to say that it tastes great, even though it is not bland, but bitter, rancid, and irritates the bowels.

If one of the natives happens to say, as the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is now saying, “This tastes awful” or “I think I’m going to be sick,” he will be branded a bigot, as love of fruitcake is the basis of all morality in Liberal Merkelland. Simply ignore the IBS and go about your business.

In the Welt of Merkel, no culture, no religion, nor any human person may be said to be better than another, even if it is at loggerheads with everything and everyone else. Yet at the same time each of these must be validated and, when duly considered, deemed deeply meaningful. We must say yes to everything, and no to nothing—except to no itself.

Islam is the diarrhetic ingredient that drains the life out of the fruitcake consumers of the West. It simply cannot be digested and eliminates everything it touches. And no matter how much fluid the dehydrated patient receives, there will be no cure for his dyspepsia so long as he continues to eat the poison morsels.

Am I being uncharitable toward Chef Angela? Stay tuned.

In late October, Merkel’s Christian [sic] Democratic Union party held a convention (at Wittenberg!) in which they were to discuss, among other things, the trouncing they’d taken during recent state elections. Apparently the Alternative for Germany party’s slogan “Islam is not a part of Germany” had resonated with more than a few, particularly in light of the ongoing and increasing episodes of rape and violence committed by Muslim migrants, a situation virtually untouched by the American and European media but chronicled in these pages by Karina Rollins. Screaming “bigot” at AfD voters seemed not to work, and so the CDU was in need of a Deplorables Strategy.

Naysayer thus became the substitute for Nazi. The AfD is so negative, declared Merkel. Nobody likes a nattering nabob. Continuing to repeat that the Muslim migrants are draining the German economy, littering the landscape with mosques, and raping girls is like “sticking a finger in a wound . . . Life will not get any better.”

Merkel simply will not tolerate negativism, including from those in her own party. Prosecutor Sasha Ott, for one, learned the hard way. All set to serve as the CDU’s minister of justice for Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, he was un-nominated by the open-minded Christian Democrats for committing the thoughtcrime of liking some AfD posts on Facebook. At a state convention, Ott dug in his heels, declaring that he refused to be bound by “chains of political correctness” and comparing the CDU to the Stasi.

But back at Wittenberg, Merkel was undeterred by this rather apt comparison. The CDU is positive! It offers solutions, not criticisms. What about those five-plus million Muslims, whose numbers are swelling, thanks to her own policies? “I know there are worries about Islam,” she admitted. But she didn’t stop there. She offered a positive solution.

Christmas carols!

“How many Christmas carols do we still know?” asked the chancellor of Germany who admitted 850,000 Muslims in a single year. “And how many of them are we passing on to our children and grandchildren?” Now, how could this have slipped the minds of German voters? Of course: Music will solve the problem. Did not music drive out the demon from Saul? And what about Jericho? O billiard-parlor walls, come a tumblin’ down.

No, really, she said that, continuing, “You just have to copy some songs, and ask someone who can play the recorder or the flute.”

Even her fellow CDUs found this to be absurd. Some snickers were heard in the audience. Surely she wasn’t serious.

“I’m being serious,” she added.

In other words, eat your fruitcake.

Now I’ve gone too far. For the truth is, I like fruitcake, if done just so. My dear departed grandpa from the Arkansas Delta had a recipe for No-Bake Fruitcake that he got from his mother, Great-Grandma Nora, which she developed as an orphan house-servant girl to please the family that kept her. (They were Germans!) And I mean to tell you, it is good. The base is at least half-pecan, and back in the day, we were pecan peddlers, so I know a thing or two about dealing with nuts. We make the No-Bake at Christmastime every year. Years ago, there was a fierce debate between my mother and Gramp over the usage of candied fruit. The result? Rival fruitcakes.

My point is this: There’s some truth in Chancellor Merkel’s statement, which we can easily miss for the condescension and downright stupidity of it.

The fact is, the little Kinder of Deutsch land are not singing Christmas carols at home, and hardly anyone is taking down the Blockflöte to spread good tidings of great joy. That’s symptomatic of something larger, something darker, concerning which a refusal to adopt a sane immigration policy is not per se the problem but merely a symptom: Germany is de-Christianizing herself.

The German people are increasingly telling pollsters that they are not Christian. Of those who say they are Christian, there is a fairly even split between “Protestants” and Catholics, with less than 30 percent of Germans “identifying” as the former, and the same percentage as the latter. Those percentages are shrinking rapidly, and German Christians who actually attend church are but a fraction of those percentages. Most significantly, very few young people identify with any form of Christianity. (More to the point, there are very few young people, period. Germany has the lowest birthrate in the world, having just now defeated Japan in the Self-Loathing Sweepstakes.) On the one hand, the church that is flavored by Bishop Marx and Cardinal Kasper lost a remarkable 200,000 lapsed members last year alone. But then the state “Protestant” church, the EKD, the liberal stepchild of the Prussian Union, is hardly enamored of the Permanent Things at all. Instead, the EKD’s head fruitcake chef, Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, told German media this past summer that he thought the best way to engender tolerance among native Germans was for imams to teach Islam to the nation’s children in state schools. Allahu akbar!

The five-plus million Muslims in Germany have no intention of assimilating. To what would they assimilate? A culture that has abandoned its center—the Christian Faith—has no basis for the cultivation of anything. It can only tear down; it cannot build up. For to build up liberalism is to engender indifference toward all meaning, all being, everything of actual value. How shall we sing the songs of Zion in a land that doesn’t believe in Zion, or Jerusalem, or Jerusalem’s Infant King?

And for that matter, what separates postmodern America from fruitcake Germany, besides a few million more Islamic nuts?